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so I'm shipping a painting to a buyer, right, my first sale in like two months that's actually a decent chunk of change, and I've spent 45 minutes bubble-wrapping this thing like it's a hostage situation. I get to the UPS store and the guy behind the counter watches me put it on the scale and goes "you know, you really should be using a rigid mailer, not a box, the box is gonna shift around in transit." and I'm like oh okay thanks but it's already packed pretty tight, I've got foam corners, it's fine. and he just WOULD NOT let it go. he's like "I ship art all the time, you're gonna get a claim" and starts telling me about the proper way to do it while I'm standing there with my debit card out. like sir I did not ask. I did not come here for a consultation. I came here to pay you $18 to put a sticker on my box. I know he was probably trying to be helpful but I was this close to being like "okay and how many watercolor paintings have YOU shipped that were still wet this morning and you stayed up too late stressing about the corners", I didn't say it because I'm a coward but I wanted to. anyway it arrived fine. no claim. I'm gonna frame that delivery confirmation and put it on my wall.

She told me my photos were too dark. That the lighting was "giving dungeon." She wanted me to show my face more, film myself working, add trending audio. I sat there in the meeting and I thought, I'm 58 years old. I build environments from scrap metal and broken furniture. I am not a content creator. I am not a brand. I am a person who makes things in a studio that looks like a bomb went off in a scrapyard. But the thing is she wasn't wrong about the engagement numbers. They're flat. They've been flat. And I don't know what to do with that information because I refuse to make the kind of content that would fix it. So I'm stuck in this weird space where I understand the game and I also refuse to play it. Anyone else just quietly accepting obscurity because the alternative looks unbearable?

So I brought a piece to my local group on Saturday, 16x20 acrylic, marsh grass at low tide with a strip of water in the back. I was actually happy with it, which is rare for me. One of the women there (she's mostly watercolor, does lovely work) said the whole thing sits flat because my grass in the foreground is the same level of detail as the grass way in the back. I'd never thought about it that way. I just painted what I saw, which is that marsh grass looks like marsh grass everywhere. Spent Sunday night going back through my reference photos and, ok, she's not wrong exactly. My close grass is a little crisper but not much. Thing is I don't know if I want to start sharpening foreground blades because I've seen paintings where that gets fussy fast and looks like a photo someone traced. Anyone else run into this? I don't want to spend my one free evening a week redoing a painting that maybe is fine.

a girl in my studio's open session last night asked me to take a look at her piece. big abstract thing, mostly palette knife, lots of texture. i actually liked the bones of it. told her the composition was fighting itself in the lower left quadrant, too much heavy color pulling the eye down and nothing anchoring the top right to balance it. suggested she either pull some of that weight up or knock the bottom back with a glaze. she goes "i disagree, i think the tension is the point." okay. sure. then why'd you ask? i don't mind someone having a vision. i mind someone asking for help and then treating it like a debate. like i'm not trying to boss you around, i'm just telling you what my eye does when it lands on your canvas. you can take it or leave it, but don't make me defend my own visual cortex lol. i told her "fair enough, it's your painting" and walked off. felt rude but also i'm not gonna stand there and argue about why i see what i see. anyway this happens more than i'd expect and i'm curious how other people handle it. i used to dig in and try to explain myself but lately i just shrug and let them figure it out. saves my energy.

what's the most insulting thing a gallery has ever done to you? not the rejection, not the ghosting, the small stuff. mine: a rep kept calling my work "lovely" for ten minutes while clearly never having looked at a single piece. walked out with my own portfolio in my hand and it took me a month to cool off about it. there's a special place in hell for people who critique work they haven't bothered to see. what's yours?

Not a critique anyone gave me. Just something I have been sitting with all week. I have a photogram of a piece of fishing net I picked off the sand at Foz in October. The net is right. The edges are right. Twenty-two minutes under the sun, seawater wash, and every knot reads clean against the paper. Technically it is the best exposure I have made this year. And I feel nothing in front of it. It looks like a diagram of a net. The ones I keep pinned to the wall are all failures. A print from last winter where the wind moved the paper and the whole lower half smeared into a soft gray, and there, right at the smear, is something I have never been able to make on purpose. I have tried to reproduce it maybe forty times since. No luck. I am starting to think the accident is not a mistake I should be learning to control. It is the actual thing. I know some of you will say ruin it deliberately, and I have tried that too, and deliberate ruin looks exactly like what it is. There is a difference between a thing going wrong and a thing being let go of. Anyway. I am not looking for a fix exactly. Maybe just someone to tell me they have the same drawer of technically correct, spiritually empty work and what they did with it.

Okay so I've been painting the sash window in my bedroom basically every week since like March. Same view of the brick wall and the neighbor's fire escape, same frame, same corner of my desk in the foreground. And at first it was a warm-up thing, you know, something easy to do before I got to the real work. But now I have like 40 of them and I think it might be the most honest thing I make. The light is never the same twice and every time I think I've nailed the way it bounces off that peeling paint, the angle's off by noon and I have to start over. I had a critique last week where someone was like, "why the same window, don't you get bored" and I didn't have the words for it in the moment. But it's not about the window. It's the pressure to always be producing something NEW and different and maybe I'm just stubborn but there's something about committing to one stupid subject until you actually understand it. My professor in school used to say restrictions are a gift and I rolled my eyes so hard but here I am, 40 paintings of one window, more confused and more in love than ever. Is anyone else doing this? One subject you keep returning to that you can't explain to people? I feel a little crazy about it and I'd like to know I'm not alone haha.

She stood in front of the big one from last spring, the 200 by 160, and said the top third looks unfinished. Not wrong, unfinished. Then she moved on to the next wall. The thing is, that third is the only part of the painting I would defend. It is three passes of cold wax scraped back almost to the ground, thin enough that you see the weave and the underpainting breathing through. It took longer than the rest put together. It is quiet on purpose. Her eye wanted something to land on there, and I understand the wanting, but I have been making the case for ten years that a painting is allowed to have a place where nothing happens. Now I am in the studio three days later and I catch myself looking at that corner like it is a mistake. This is the part nobody warns you about. The critique does not become a thought, it becomes a light source, and everything looks a little different under it. I do not think I will change it. But I am less sure than I was on Tuesday, and I resent that a little. Naja. Has anyone else had a remark like this lodge in the eye and refuse to leave? And did you hold the line or did you eventually see what they saw?

Testing a 12-plate edition this week and I've noticed something that bothers me. Pulls 4 and 5 come out of the press effectively identical. Same ink, same pressure, same sheet from the same batch of Somerset. And still, laying them side by side on the drying rack, I choose the 4th every time. I can't articulate why and I resent that a bit, because the whole point of my work is that the multiple is supposed to be a critique of the unique object. I've been telling this to students for years. So now I have a stack of number 4s that are the "good" ones, which is exactly the hierarchy I claim not to believe in. Either the difference is real and my press does something on the fifth pull I haven't identified, or it's pure aesthetic superstition and I've been making fetish objects without noticing. What I actually suspect: it's not the print at all, it's the sequence. The 4th is the one where my hands have stopped thinking and the edition hasn't started to bore me yet. Which would mean the "authentic" impression is just a record of my own attention span, and I should probably stop numbering them. But I won't. Has anyone else caught themselves doing this with an edition? Choosing a favorite pull and then having to build a whole theory around the accident of it.

Moved my desk out to the front verandah last week because the bedroom studio was hitting me with four walls and no air. Best decision in months. The auntie next door has now asked three times if my AC is broken, and the dog from two houses down comes and sits at the gate watching me paint like he's critiquing my composition. The light out here is genuinely different. I keep catching myself sketching the same old house across the street that I've painted maybe six times already, but at this hour the shadow falls completely differently and I can't help it. Downside is every passerby thinks you're available for conversation. Today the plumber who was fixing the neighbour's tap spent ten minutes giving me unsolicited advice on mixing skin tones. He wasn't wrong though. That's the embarrassing part. 🙂

That review still sits in my head months later. Two mixed-media pieces in a group show, and the writeup gave me one word: cluttered. Everything else got paragraphs. I know what they meant, I'm not even fully arguing with it. I do pile things on. Torn paper over charcoal over washes, found photos buried in there. I like the density. But now every time I'm building a piece I hear that word and I pull back, and the pieces get cleaner and also more boring. I keep trying to figure out if there's a version of busy that reads as rich instead of messy, or if I'm just defending a habit because it's mine. One of the two pieces in that show sold to someone who wrote me a note about what it meant to them, so clearly it landed on somebody. Doesn't stop the word from sticking though. Anyone else get one critique that reshaped how they work for months after, even while telling yourself not to let it?

I was working on a small still life on Sunday, just pears, nothing fancy, and my 11yo wandered through the kitchen, glanced at it, and said "that's fine, mom." Fine. Not good, not bad, just fine. And I know that's a kid being a kid, he didn't mean anything by it, but man it's stuck with me. I think because I've been in a rut lately where everything I finish feels just... fine. Competent but flat. Like I hit the technical notes but there's no spark. And hearing it out loud from somebody who wasn't even trying to critique me just kind of confirmed it. Anyway I moved the pears around and repainted the background last night and I think it helped. We'll see if he upgrades me to "pretty good" this weekend lol.